Just Desserts (The Simon Bognor Mysteries)

by Tim Heald

  The personal secretary was not amused at being woken so early but on hearing the reason he hurried from his closet and followed the steward to Sir Roderick’s boudoir. Once there he turned pale and dabbed limply at his brow.

  ‘The bathroom,’ he said. ‘We must try the bathroom.’

  The bathroom door was not locked since Sir Roderick’s position guaranteed a privacy born of extreme fear. The two men entered apprehensively, to find Sir Roderick Farquhar reclining placidly in his ancient bathtub. The grubby water lapped the peak of his paunch in time to the motion of the wagon’s progress. The newspapers lay across the bath as neat and unsullied as the bedroom sheets. The face of Mammoncorp’s president wore a benign expression of happy repose that neither observer had ever previously witnessed.

  He was, of course, extremely dead.

  1

  SIMON BOGNOR GAZED WANLY at the lake. It looked cold. Across its bleak, grey surface a tall unwieldy ferryboat was churning towards the ring of islands which shielded the harbour from the worst of the storm. On a clear summer’s day, Bognor knew, you could see the spray from Niagara Falls, simply by peering hard from the twenty-fifth floor of any hotel in town. In winter you were lucky to see beyond the end of your nose. He rubbed his stomach reflectively and put a piece of croissant in his mouth. The room was warm. Hot indeed. Despite the arctic outside, it was possible for a man to stand stripped to the waist wearing only a pair of striped cotton pyjama trousers knotted nonchalantly below the navel with a bow. Bognor knew a shop near Jermyn Street in London where they had not yet discovered the elastic waistband. He sighed. He had no overcoat. It never snowed in November. He had rung the High Commission in London before leaving, spoken to the Minister for Public Affairs no less.

  ‘Never snows in Toronto before December,’ he had said. ‘Besides, Canada’s centrally heated. And you don’t have to walk anywhere.’

  Bognor in early middle age was not a pretty sight. His hair was going fast and his waist, never a dominant feature, had finally disappeared. His complexion was unclear and he had more than one chin. He buttered another piece of croissant. The trouble with this sort of place, he thought to himself, was that they never gave you enough bloody butter. It came in a plastic capsule designed to appeal only to those whose life was dominated by their cholesterol count. He thought of ringing room service for more but decided against. He would have a yoghurt shake for lunch. There was a place in the depths of the Sheraton Center where they did an apple-blossom yoghurt shake unlike anything he had ever tasted.

  He had been here before. Not many months earlier there had been an untidy business involving a colleague in the Toronto consulate whose body had been discovered deep-frozen by a cross-country skier in a conservation area a few miles to the north of the city. For reasons too eccentric to be accurately described as reasons, Bognor had suspected Sir Roderick Farquhar of smuggling a new and powerful form of LSD across the Atlantic in jars of Gentleman’s Relish. In this he had been mistaken. It had been the work of Farquhar’s personal assistant and neither the Canadian nor the British Government had been amused by Bognor’s aspersions. Farquhar was too significant to be messed around by a middle-rank investigator from the British Board of Trade. The RCMP, however, had belatedly come round to his point of view. Bognor’s intervention had thrown up a lot of dust and some of it had been gathering on the Mounties’ files. Farquhar, it transpired, had a past. The files pointed to pre-war Latvia and a sinister accommodation with pro-Nazi elements. Later there had been an undoubted involvement in the Viennese black market, prostitution in Batista’s Cuba and regular Paraguayan business trips which had continued until the year of his death. Before he arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, one autumn morning in 1951, Farquhar had had at least five names. Not one of them was Farquhar.

  Bognor yawned. As a result of all this he was held in a certain awe by the men of the Mounties, besides which he was the Board of Trade’s expert on Canadian affairs. He had only been in Canada for six weeks on the Gentleman’s Relish case but that was at least five weeks longer than anyone else in the board’s offices in Whitehall and it gave him a reputation. He did not discourage this. He was not good at his job and he was therefore forced to grab at anything which could convince his colleagues to the contrary. Accordingly he made a point of studying the hockey results in the small print of his Daily Telegraph. He would then irritate everyone by remarking from time to time, ‘Leafs shut out the Sabres yesterday’ or ‘Lafleur scored three Wednesday’ or ‘Seems Orr’s knee broke down again’. All of which meant nothing at all at the Board of Trade, and precious little to Bognor. It did, on the other hand, impress them, however marginally. Like most Englishmen, they knew very little about Canada and were not eager to know more.

  Bognor finished the croissants and put on yesterday’s shirt and a clean tie. He resented laundry bills, regarding them as needlessly expensive. At home his washing was done by his new bride, Monica. New bride, old girlfriend. She had been part of his furniture for as long as he could remember. They had finally married for reasons of which neither was entirely sure. It was something to do with feeling too old to live in sin. Also they both, though neither had admitted it, felt a vague desire to be unfaithful and this was easier, and safer, within wedlock than without. Negative reasons, Bognor conceded, but then he had seldom done anything for positive ones. They had married at Chelsea Registry Office on a sodden morning six weeks ago. Parkinson, his boss, had been best man, held the ring, brought along a brace of red carnations and taken them to lunch at Santa Croce in Cheyne Walk by the Thames. They had become euphoric on champagne and lasagne verde.

  ‘O tempora! O mores!’ he muttered, fumbling with a knot of his tie. Any semblance of control over his life seemed to have gone long ago. Ever since that terrible moment at Oxford when he had fatuously been deflected from his decent, ordinary, humble ambition to become a bureaucrat. He would have been an admirable civil servant. He was designed for indecision, for referring matters to colleagues and committees, initialling reports without comment. He could in time have become a master of the art of office filibuster, of saying nothing, importantly. He might have achieved a minor medal. Or more. Become Sir Simon. Something vital but unspecified in the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, or Employment. Instead he had listened to the man at the Appointments Bureau and ended up in a branch of what was laughingly called ‘Intelligence’, a department cloaked in the half-baked pseudo-secrecy of a basement office in the Board of Trade. All cloak and no dagger. Codes, ciphers and, over the years, a half dozen or so bizarre assignments that had started tamely and ended … distressingly.

  He put on his jacket and glanced at the front page of the Globe and Mail. The main story appeared to be about a committee appointed by the Ontario government to investigate traffic pollution. They had immediately gone to investigate traffic pollution in the Bahamas. The Globe smelt corruption. Alongside the piece there was an account of a boat trip up the Yangtse by the Peking correspondent. Bognor had noticed on his previous visit that the Globe had little time for abroad in general but made up for it by keeping a man in China. He supposed that this was because China was the only place on earth where there was never any news—or if there was, no one was allowed to report it.

  The phone rang—a soft, cat-like sound.

  ‘Bognor,’ he said, briskly.

  ‘Hi, Si. Good to have you back. It’s Pete Smith. RCMP. We met on the last Mammon case. Do you have a moment?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ Bognor swore to himself. Of course he had a bloody moment. More like several moments. All the time in the world.

  ‘Shall I come round?’

  ‘Up to you. I could meet you somewhere. I ought to buy some boots, and a hat. I was caught unawares.’

  ‘Canada’s kinda cold in winter, Simon.’

  ‘I heard. Your men in London didn’t seem to think it was winter, yet. If I go and buy something woolly I can meet you afterwards.’

  ‘OK, Simon. You can buy your gear
at Simpsons, then we can meet on the roof.’

  ‘The roof?’

  ‘Sure. There’s a coffee shop up there. Haven’t been for years, but I guess they’ll fix coffee.’

  ‘Right,’ said Bognor. ‘Shall we say an hour, then? I’ll go up to the coffee shop and ask for you. And if you don’t recognize me I’ll be the one in the new boots.’

  He could charge the boots to expenses. There would be a row with Parkinson but he would get away with it in the end. Now that Parkinson had moved up a rung or two he was magnanimous. He had a bigger office and more pay and sometimes the exasperation with which he regarded his subordinate was tinged with affection. Or so it seemed.

  Outside in the street the force of the wind took him by surprise. It was snowing in what was locally known as ‘a flurry’ and it ripped into his face on gusts of urban gale frozen by its long passage east across the prairies. Or south across the frozen north. He wasn’t sure. Geography had never been one of his strong points. Wherever it came from, this was not the sort of snow he was used to. His snow was a thin British drizzle that turned to slush the second it hit the ground or, just occasionally, left a film of white dust redolent of Dickensian Christmas cards. This snow was not at all the same. It stung. It came at you from all sides and even when it should have been lying serenely in your path it leaped up and hit you amidships. Looking about him he realized that everyone else was dressed for it. Their lower legs were encased in galoshes and ‘fun-fur’ boots that looked as if they had been cut from a living Yorkshire terrier. Their hands were mittened and their heads protected by long scarves and fur hats, tea-cosey-shaped woollen things and balaclavas, their bodies by melodramatic parkas and eiderdown-filled great-coats guaranteed to keep you warm in a temperature of hundreds of degrees below zero. By the time he reached the main railway station he was beginning to lose feeling in the tip of his nose and fingers. Somewhere he had read that a man’s lungs could freeze in this sort of weather and then explode like burst water pipes when they thawed out. It was with enormous relief that he stumbled into the womb-like welcome of a high brass and glass structure belonging to one of the many banks that lined Bay Street.

  ‘By god!’ he gasped, breathing heavily and rubbing his hands between his knees to get the circulation going, ‘Bloody Arctic!’ It had now become incredibly hot. With a fine disregard for the energy crisis the bank appeared to be blowing hot air around its building, as if it were trying to cultivate cacti. It was a tactic calculated to bring on pneumonia in any normal man and Bognor knew it. He feared he was suffering from terminal hypochondria and that this was likely to precipitate a fatal attack. He was so preoccupied with the tingling in his fingers that he didn’t notice the girl at first. His eyes were watering, blurring the passers-by as they hurried down the escalators into the bowels of the building.

  ‘Mr Bognor.’ The girl seemed solicitous. She was very small, not more than about five foot two, swathed in a light brown fur which Bognor judged to be synthetic. Her boots were shiny brown and she had on a dark blue beret, pulled down over the ears. Though none of her hair was showing she looked dark, almost olive-skinned. Her eyes were a light translucent blue and she wore very little make-up.

  ‘Mr Bognor,’ she repeated. ‘Are you all right?’ She spoke with the distinctive accent of the Quebecois, a sound which was to French as American is to English. He felt flattered by this unexpected attention. He had always found Canadians unforthcoming, as anxious about social intercourse as the English were supposed to be. Torontonians most of all. Even they admitted to being in the crude vernacular of the place ‘tight-arsed’.

  ‘How did you know who I was?’ asked Bognor, who rather prided himself on his chameleon-like anonymity, his effortless ability to blend into the surroundings. He had thought he was looking rather Canadian today.

  ‘It’s not important,’ she said. ‘Let’s just say I was given a description, also a photograph.’

  ‘But you’re not a Mountie?’

  ‘No, of course not. Quite different. But we too have ways of finding things out. The description was very accurate. But it’s not important, we’re wasting time.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bognor.

  ‘You must buy a coat,’ said the girl, ‘or you will freeze. You English are crazy.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Bognor. ‘Pas du tout. I was on my way to buy a coat. I left mine behind. Silly of me. I simply hadn’t realized …’

  She cut him short impatiently. ‘We must talk,’ she said. ‘It’s very important.’

  ‘We are talking,’ he said, pinching his nose, to clear the brain. ‘But how did you know who I was?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Oh, but it does.’ Bognor’s lucidity was returning. ‘You knew my name. We haven’t met.’ He peered hard into the face, pert and gamine, tried to fathom the piercing eyes. ‘Have we?’

  ‘We have friends in the RCMP. Your photo is in our files after the affair of the Gentleman’s Relish,’ she said, glancing about her. ‘We must hurry. They may be watching. I must go now. We will see you tonight. Take this, and au revoir.’

  Before he could complain further, the girl had turned and hurried away into the crowd. Before doing so, however, she had thrust a small white envelope into his hand. Opening it he saw that it was a theatre ticket: third row of the stalls for tonight’s performance at the Royal Alexandra Theater. He pocketed it, bemused, and set off down the escalator and then through the catacombs, the long lanes of boutiques and delis and underground trees and fountains which threaded the city’s foundations like a rabbit warren. Ten minutes later he came out on the corner of Bay and Queen, made a quick dash across the street and emerged red and breathless in Simpsons’ shoe department. Just over half an hour later he looked almost Canadian. On his feet he wore a pair of waterproof galoshes over the brown brogues he had brought from London. He had a pair of padded mitts, a knee-length quilted parka and a green woollen hat with a bobble decorated by a ring of prancing caribou. He toyed with the idea of ski-goggles and a pair of herringbone knickers, specifically designed for striding across the frozen wastes, but he decided they were too melodramatic. Far too melodramatic for coffee with Smith of the Mounties.

  He was quite breathless when he reached the coffee shop. His parcels were encumbering, and he had taken a couple of wrong turnings. At the entrance a man in a Tip Top Tailors’ suit stood waiting.

  ‘Si,’ he said, hand outstretched. ‘Great to see you.’

  Bognor grappled with his parcels and failed to extricate a hand.

  ‘Nice to see you, too,’ he replied. He was almost certain he had never seen the policeman before in his life. He was lean and bony with an oversized nose and a weathered complexion. His hair was very short and he had a neatly trimmed ginger moustache.

  ‘You take coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes please.’ Bognor made to join the line-up which moved slowly past the unappetising displays of processed food, but Smith waved him towards a table by the window.

  ‘You just set your bags down and rest your feet. How d’you like it?’

  ‘Black, no sugar,’ said Bognor. He never had milk before lunch.

  ‘Be right with you,’ said Smith.

  The snow had settled patchily on the green copper of the old City Hall roof just opposite. Bognor watched in idle fascination as the wind gusted along the guttering and teased the gargoyles. It was beginning to drift.

  He thought of Sir Roderick Farquhar dead in his railway carriage between Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat, a fat corpse slopping around in the bath, depressingly unlamented. Death had been by bath oil. Bognor was no chemist but someone who was had managed to insinuate a lethal substance into Sir Roderick’s bottle of Balenciaga. Phosphorus trioxide, the lab report had said. Otherwise known as P406. At first they had thought it might have been supersaturated sulphuric acid but that would have left burns. Farquhar had died from inhaling phosphine, produced by phosphorus trioxide crystals, more of which had been found in the bottle. T
he clever thing about the crystals was that they didn’t turn into gas until they were mixed with warm water—28.3 degrees Centigrade to be precise. The glass of the bottle was opaque so the old boy wouldn’t have noticed anything, especially as he was invariably half-cut after dinner. He wouldn’t have known a thing till the phosphine hit him. By which time it would have been too late. He’d have been out before he could say Dow Jones. Nice way to go for a nasty piece of work. Amos Littlejohn, the steward, claimed that the dead man had always poured the oil in himself. He also swore that that night’s bottle was brand new and sealed. The level of liquid confirmed this. The seal, like that on so many of Sir Roderick’s personal effects, was wax, and seemed newly broken.

  ‘One black coffee no sugar.’ Smith put the coffee down on the formica top of the table and smiled automatically. Bognor was glad they were on the same side. He had a cold-fish look that suggested a sinister expertise in the interrogation room.

  ‘You making much progress?’ asked Bognor, carefully pouring spilled coffee from the saucer back into the cup.

  Smith peeled the top off a sachet of sugar and poured it fastidiously, then stirred with his spoon.

  ‘I wouldn’t say “much”,’ he replied. He took a sip of coffee and dabbed at the corners of the moustache.

  ‘You get what you wanted?’ He indicated Bognor’s parcels, and Bognor nodded. Smith was clearly going to come to the point in his own time, ponderously and unhurried. That was fine by Bognor. He much preferred to let others make the running, so for five minutes or so the conversation followed a trivial course quite unconnected with the matter at the forefront of both their minds. Eventually Smith said, ‘You heard what’s happening at Mammoncorp?’

  Bognor nodded. No holds had been barred in the internecine struggles in the Mammon boardroom and the warring factions were still at each other’s throats. Quite apart from the antipathies of various directors, previously held in check by Sir Roderick, there had been the unseemly squabbling of various relations of the dead man. None of his four wives was still living; the major beneficiary of his will appeared to be one of his later mistresses, a peroxide blonde presently residing in a white clapboard mansion overlooking Skaneateles Lake in upper New York state. This lady, unexpectedly cognomened ‘La Bandanna Rose’, was actually a former fan dancer named Dolores V. Crump, and as soon as she had heard of Sir Roderick’s demise she flew into town to defend her interests, with a sharp Manhattan lawyer riding shotgun. Bognor’s latest intelligence was that though there was no way her purely financial situation could be threatened, power was going the way of Sir Roderick’s son-in-law Ainsley Cernik, a handsome but supposedly stupid cipher dominated by the formidable women around him. But the situation was not fully resolved and there were a number of shadowy influences. The Canadian Government was said to favour Cernik, but the Americans were not averse to La Bandanna Rose, whose candidate, Colonel Crombie, had a place in Florida and was an admirer and acquaintance of Ronald Reagan and Bob Hope. Bognor had himself been instructed to do all he could to further the ambitions of a third force, dominated by a handful of old-monied patricians from the wealthy Toronto and Montreal districts of Rosedale and Westmount. The leader of this group was an elderly Anglophile named Harrison Bentley. Privately Bognor regarded him as a ‘no-hoper’ but he would, as always, do as he was told.